Before Blue Birds Became X-tinct: Understanding the Effect of Regime Change on Twitter's Advertising and Compliance of Advertising Policies

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12591v1
• Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2023 02:39:53 GMT
• Title: Before Blue Birds Became X-tinct: Understanding the Effect of Regime Change on Twitter's Advertising and Compliance of Advertising Policies
• Authors: Yash Vekaria (1), Zubair Shafiq (1), Savvas Zannettou (2) ((1) University of California, Davis, (2) Delft University of Technology)
• Abstract summary: We present the first large-scale audit of advertising on Twitter focusing on compliance with the platform's advertising policies. We find evidence of widespread noncompliance with Twitter's political and adult content advertising policies. Major brands decreased their advertising on Twitter, suggesting a negative immediate effect on the platform's advertising revenue.
• Score: 0.562479170374811
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Social media platforms, including Twitter (now X), have policies in place to maintain a safe and trustworthy advertising environment. However, the extent to which these policies are adhered to and enforced remains a subject of interest and concern. We present the first large-scale audit of advertising on Twitter focusing on compliance with the platform's advertising policies, particularly those related to political and adult content. We investigate the compliance of advertisements on Twitter with the platform's stated policies and the impact of recent acquisition on the advertising activity of the platform. By analyzing 34K advertisements from ~6M tweets, collected over six months, we find evidence of widespread noncompliance with Twitter's political and adult content advertising policies suggesting a lack of effective ad content moderation. We also find that Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter had a noticeable impact on the advertising landscape, with most existing advertisers either completely stopping their advertising activity or reducing it. Major brands decreased their advertising on Twitter, suggesting a negative immediate effect on the platform's advertising revenue. Our findings underscore the importance of external audits to monitor compliance and improve transparency in online advertising.

Related papers

• On the Use of Proxies in Political Ad Targeting [49.61009579554272]
  We show that major political advertisers circumvented mitigations by targeting proxy attributes. Our findings have crucial implications for the ongoing discussion on the regulation of political advertising.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-18T17:15:13Z)
• Why am I Still Seeing This: Measuring the Effectiveness Of Ad Controls and Explanations in AI-Mediated Ad Targeting Systems [55.02903075972816]
  We evaluate the effectiveness of Meta's "See less" ad control and the actionability of ad targeting explanations following the shift to AI-mediated targeting. We find that utilizing the "See less" ad control for the topics we study does not significantly reduce the number of ads shown by Meta on these topics. We find that the majority of ad targeting explanations for local ads made no reference to location-specific targeting criteria.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-21T18:03:11Z)
• Long-Term Ad Memorability: Understanding & Generating Memorable Ads [54.23854539909078]
  There has been no large-scale study on the memorability of ads. We release the first memorability dataset, LAMBDA, consisting of 1749 participants and 2205 ads covering 276 brands.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-09-01T10:27:04Z)
• On Detecting Policy-Related Political Ads: An Exploratory Analysis of Meta Ads in 2022 French Election [8.191542320784347]
  The budget spent solely on political advertising in the U.S. has increased by more than 100% from $700 million during the 2017-2018 U.S. election cycle to $1.6 billion during the 2020 U.S. presidential elections. The capacity offered by online platforms to micro-target ads with political content has been worrying lawmakers, journalists, and online platforms. Online platforms and regulators have agreed that researchers, journalists, and civil society need to be able to scrutinize the political ads running on large online platforms.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-02-14T09:04:43Z)
• News consumption and social media regulations policy [70.31753171707005]
  We analyze two social media that enforced opposite moderation methods, Twitter and Gab, to assess the interplay between news consumption and content regulation. Our results show that the presence of moderation pursued by Twitter produces a significant reduction of questionable content. The lack of clear regulation on Gab results in the tendency of the user to engage with both types of content, showing a slight preference for the questionable ones which may account for a dissing/endorsement behavior.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-06-07T19:26:32Z)
• Analyzing the "Sleeping Giants" Activism Model in Brazil [1.549278866004654]
  Sleeping Giants Brasil (SGB) campaigned against media outlets using Twitter to ask companies to remove ads from the targeted outlets. This work presents a thorough quantitative characterization of this activism model, analyzing the three campaigns carried out by SGB between May and September 2020.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-05-16T21:47:30Z)
• Understanding the Complexity of Detecting Political Ads [0.9391375268580806]
  We take an empirical approach to analyze what kind of ads are deemed political by ordinary people and what kind of ads lead to disagreement. Our results imply that it is important to consider social issue ads as political, but they also complicate political advertising regulations.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-03-01T07:44:08Z)
• Facebook Ads: Politics of Migration in Italy [12.947791375188022]
  We employ a new resource for political ad monitoring -- Facebook Ads Library -- to examine advertising concerning the issue of immigration in Italy. We find evidence of targeting by the parties both in terms of geography and demographics (age and gender) We urge the research community to include online advertising in the monitoring of public discourse.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-10-09T09:32:31Z)
• Facebook Political Ads And Accountability: Outside Groups Are Most Negative, Especially When Hiding Donors [0.0]
  We analyze how transparency and accountability deficits relate to the sentiment of political ads on Facebook. The most negative advertising came from dark money and disappearing outside groups. Only dark money was associated with a significant decrease in ad sentiment.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-10-05T00:53:43Z)
• An Empirical Study of In-App Advertising Issues Based on Large Scale App Review Analysis [67.58267006314415]
  We present a large-scale analysis on ad-related user feedback from App Store and Google Play. From a statistical analysis of 36,309 ad-related reviews, we find that users care most about the number of unique ads and ad display frequency during usage. Some ad issue types are addressed more quickly by developers than other ad issues.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-08-22T05:38:24Z)
• Do Interruptions Pay Off? Effects of Interruptive Ads on Consumers Willingness to Pay [79.9312329825761]
  We present the results of a study designed to measure the impact of interruptive advertising on consumers willingness to pay for products bearing the advertiser's brand. Our results contribute to the research on the economic impact of advertising, and introduce a method of measuring actual (as opposed to self-reported) willingness to pay in experimental marketing research.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-14T09:26:57Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.